


Finding a Win

by DestielsDestiny



Category: Supernatural
Genre: 13x05 fix it, BAMF Castiel (Supernatural), Dom Castiel, Episode Related, Episode Tag, Family Feels, Fix-It, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Hugs, Hurt Dean Winchester, Hurt/Comfort, Loss, M/M, Men of Letters Bunker, POV Dean Winchester, Protective Castiel, Protective Sam Winchester, Resurrected Castiel (Supernatural), Season/Series 13, Suicidal Thoughts, how could they end the episode there?, seriously
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-12
Updated: 2017-11-12
Packaged: 2019-02-01 07:02:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,315
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12699804
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DestielsDestiny/pseuds/DestielsDestiny
Summary: Dean just...misses Cas.





	Finding a Win

**Author's Note:**

> I own nothing. Coda to 13x05, fixing that scene. You know the one.

“The voice says I’m out of minutes.” It’s the words that do it, really. That get him. 

Dean is never quite sure how he doesn’t plow himself and Sam clean off the road into a ditch, hearing those words. And not because of the voice, gravelly and firm and soul shatteringly familiar. And not because Dean is fairly sure nobody on the planet has even had minutes for about five years. It isn’t even the fact only three people have ever had this particular number, two of whom are dead. And only one of whom Dean sat down with a que card, repeating it over and over, cheerfully ignoring Cas’ huffed, “I am still an angel. I have perfect recall Dean.”

No, it’s the way it’s said. No greeting, because none is necessary. Because Cas only ever phones one person, and of course Dean will always be the one to answer. 

Cas doesn’t do greetings. 

It had taken Dean several attempts at teaching Mary to use a cellphone with Cas’ oh so helpful input to realize that that wasn’t quite true. Cas doesn’t do greetings with Dean. “It’s unnecessary,” had been his succinct explanation. 

Dean had pretended not to appear to care. He suspects he failed. 

He had pretended that fact didn’t mean the world to him. He knows he failed. 

Cas doesn’t do greetings. Not with Dean. They are unnecessary. Dean would know that voice anywhere. Does know it anywhere, apparently. Even from beyond the proverbial grave. He’s sure. 

It’s Cas. He knows it, just as he always has. 

It’s the normality of those words, the certainty of that recognition, that prevent Dean from cracking the plastic casing on his phone with his grip. That allow him to summon the courage to not simple burst into tears and demand Cas fly his feathered but over here, right now. Wings juiced up or not. 

It is the normality that gives Dean the calm to drive for nearly three hours in the face of Sam’s questioning silences. 

But it’s the hope that gives him the strength to go at all. 

00

It is about Cas. Dean doesn’t feel guilty about that, which only makes the whole thing worse. Particularly at that delightful sham of family grief counselling, when Sam had talked about Mary with raw intensity, his grief shining from him like a beacon. 

The part of Dean, the really big part, that just wants to wrap his baby brother in a hug and never let go wants to feel guilty. But somehow, even then, even in that moment, he just can’t. 

Oh don’t get Dean wrong, he’s mad as hell about what happened to Mom. And he will follow Sam along any scheme to get her back, or to just make sure she’s okay. And he wants to know, he needs to know, if she’s still out there. And he misses her, so damn much its hard to breath. 

But Dean’s felt like that before. Dean grew up feeling like that. Hell, he barely remembers what it’s like to not feel like that. A grief so consuming, so painful, that every day is a struggle just to keep living. But it’s a struggle he’s fought and won every day of his life since he was four years old. Through losing Mom, through losing Dad, Ellen, Joe, Bobby, Kevin, and in some bizarre way he’ll only ever acknowledge to himself, even through losing Cain, of all people. 

And it’s a struggle through losing Crowley, and yes, even through losing Mom, again. It’s a struggle that nearly kills him, but it’s a struggle he can face. It’s a struggle he can fight. It’s a struggle he can even, on the best of days, win for a little while. 

But this is different. This melancholy, this pain, this despair. This is different. 

Dean is no stranger to having a death wish. For him, it’s always gone skipping along hand in hand with that grief, merrily eating his liver into a bottle and his soul into Hell. 

He’s no stranger to drinking, to blame, to shouting at the heavens and screaming at the depths of Hell. He’s no stranger to punching things, looking for any hunt he can, yelling at Sammy until he cries and the guilt overwhelms the pain for just a while. To mindless sex, mindless drinking, mindless recklessness. 

This is different though. He feels it in his bones. This is something he can’t shake, somehow. 

He knows it, when he begs Chuck to fix everything, in a way he hasn’t begged since long before John’s death. He knows it, when his heart breaks all over again when he opens his eyes and there’s nothing there, and he realizes that he let himself actually hope this time. That he, somewhere along the last few years, had learned what it meant to have faith. 

And how painful it is when that faith is proven as hollow as he always suspected it to be. 

So no, this isn’t about losing Mom. 

This is why he can’t quite look at Jack, even stone cold sober, even as the kid stops being a potential threat and edges closer to the place in his heart firmly labelled Claire, with a Ben locked away at the edges, never to be looked at too closely. 

Because when he looks at Jack, all he sees it Cas. Every head tilt, every near religious experience love of new foods, every overly intense TV watching episode. Every awkward question, every glance with too much depth and too much intensity to ever pass as anything remotely approaching just plain old human. 

He doesn’t even blame the boy for Cas’ death, not anymore. No more than he blames Cas. 

He just can’t quite look at Jack, no matter how much he feels like he’s letting Cas down all over again, every time he tries and fails. 

This is why he can’t respond to Sam’s attempts to fix things, no matter how elaborate or ludicrously transparent they become. A strip club, subtle much Sammy?

This is why he listens to the latest speil from the latest great supernatural power junky on the block about how special he and Sam are, how much they are needed, how they have work to do, and he just feels tired. Apathetic. Done. 

That feeling scares him more than any of the rest of it, because Dean recognizes what he is doing. He grew up watching this very scenario play out in living colour. He grew up watching the death of Mary Winchester destroy her husband. 

Because Mary, Mary was John’s. Not in a possessive sense, although as an objective adult, Dean can think of a lot of problems in his parent’s marriage, and his father’s attitude towards women in general. Hell, John’s attitude towards anyone really. 

No, what he really means is that Mary was the most important person in John’s world. The one person who loved him more than anyone else ever could, who loved him above all others. 

Just as Dean was Sam’s. Just as Chuck was fucking Lucifer’s, apparently. 

And just as Cas was Dean’s. Cas saw Dean, in a way no one else has ever bothered to try to. From the moment they met, Dean always known with unwavering certainty that as long as Castiel exists out there in the universe somewhere, Dean Winchester will never truly be alone again. Never truly be unseen. Never truly be misunderstood. 

Whether it’s sensing the Mark of Cain through bullshit and three layers of clothing, whether it’s staring at a man he’s just met and guessing a truth his closest family members have never come close to grasping, before or since. You don’t believe you deserve to be saved. Whatever the reason, whatever the moment, Cas has always seen Dean. 

Trouble is, Cas isn’t here anymore. And Dean has no clue what to do with that. 

He has no clue how to survive that. Cas has always been there, always. Even before Dean met him, he was still out there somewhere. Angels are watching over you. 

Dean didn’t know who he was before he met Cas. And he has no clue who he is now that he’s lost Cas. And no particular desire to find out. 

Dean knows how to live through losing Mary Winchester. He knows how to not live through losing Sam Winchester. 

But Dean hasn’t the foggiest how to survive losing Castiel. 

So he looks Sam in the eye, and he admits he’s not okay, and he knows with cruel certainty that it doesn’t change anything. 

Cas is still dead. And Dean still wishes he died with him. 

And he doesn’t see that ever changing, no matter how much Sam tries to help him, or how much he tries to forget, or how much he tries to do right by Claire and Jack. 

He just…misses Cas. 

00

“Hello Dean.” The inflection is as gravelled and momentous as he remembers. As he isn’t likely to forget, the voice of his daydreams equally the voice of his nightmares these days, haunting every snatched four hours or hell even four minutes now. 

Cas always sounds like that, that same mix of stern and certain and warm and safe. That same tone of import. That same single minded focus, as if Dean is the only other being in the universe. 

He always sounds like that, whether he’s just pulled Dean from Hell or popped out to the store for pie, whether they haven’t seen each other in five minutes or five years, whether one of them has just come back from the dead. 

Dean chokes on his own thoughts, his face salty with tears he hadn’t realized were even falling. 

“C-Cas?” It sounds small, his voice. It sounds broken. It sounds lost. 

Cas-and it is Cas, for if the voice and words hadn’t already given it away, this seals it-softens, his entire face going squishy and pained in that way he’s always had, even when he was a conflicted warrior of God, all precise head turns and coiled power and angel blade wrapped in a really tacky trench coat. Chuck does Dean miss that Cas sometimes. Life was so much, much simpler then, apocalypse and all. 

It’s the head tilt that gets Dean thought, because Cas hasn’t done that in years-and then the gravelly voice intones a weary, “Dean…” And that is a more recent development, a part of the odd amalgam of millennia old warrior angel and awkward, guilt-ridden millennial who likes burgers and hasn’t quite mastered fatherhood that makes up only little parts of Dean’s Cas, the one he knows now. The one he lost. 

The one standing in front of him, as if his body wasn’t torched to ashes by the very lighter Dean feels weighing down his jacket pocket, like a stone he just can’t seem to let go of. 

Dean had cried as they burned Cas’ body. He had cried every night since, biting into his pillow hard enough to taste old, cheap foam, only to roll over gasping for air, and remember that it didn’t matter, because Cas was no longer there to here him. 

No longer there to watch over him. 

Dean has not cried on the drive here. He hadn’t spoken either, his hands clenched white on the Impala’s steering wheel, silent apologies to Baby for the abuse running through his head over and over and over, anything to not think, to not wonder, to not hope. To not pray. 

Dean hasn’t prayed since he broke three of his knuckles on a really tacky beach stand wall, because what’s the point. 

There’s no one listening. 

Sam’s boots crunch on the gravel behind him, snapping Dean out of his side of the tableau he and Cas are- 

Dean breaks off, wheeling his body on an unsteady heel, his hand curled into a loose fist as it makes contact with his mouth in an effort to stifle the hiccupped sob that seems to come out of nowhere. 

The hand that lands on his shoulder is firm, hard as stone, and Dean twists away automatically because that’s right over his mark and no one is allowed to touch him, not there, no one but-

“Dean.” He’s never met anyone who could sound quite as furiously righteous as Castiel. Even God is a damn poor substitute it turns out. An inappropriate giggle bubbles up through Dean, and apparently hysteria is the emotion his poor brain went with here, and the hand is still there, tightening, yanking. 

Dean lets himself be spun like a rag doll, lets his gaze lock with a pair of electric-bright blue eyes, lets the pure, angelic fury wash over him, because its Cas and he’s right here and somehow, this is real. Right? 

Dean blinks dumbly, his face strangely wet. “This is real, right Cas?” He whispers it, like a benediction. Like a prayer. Somewhere behind them, Sam lets out a ragged sob. What a sap Dean thinks fondly. 

Cas’ free hand grasps Dean’s chin with a bruising intensity, his eyes reading right into Dean’s soul. The voice has gone beyond gravel into chipped granite. 

“Yes Dean, this is very real. I am here now, just as you are. And that will not be changing.” He fires the last like bullets from the Colt, deadly and accurate and breath stealing. And it takes Dean a moment, a very long moment, to connect the pieces.

I want to die. 

Ah. Guess Cas has his minding reading mojo back then. Awesome. Although that does explain the whole righteous fury bit. 

“Dean.” His angel sounds more exasperated than angry. That’s good. 

“S’ alright Cas, m’not going anywhere. I found m’ win.” Dean has been stone cold sober since Billie revealed herself as Death 2.0, mostly because Sam no longer allows him to keep whiskey in the Impala, so he hasn’t the foggiest idea why he’s slurring his words together. 

Although the tears clogging Dean’s throat might have something to do with it. What is wrong with him these days. He’s turning into a complete wimp. 

And just like that, the fury is back. “Don’t demean yourself Dean. We’ve talked about this at length.” They had, many times. Cas had had flow charts. Dean had smiled politely and eaten his reward pie with shameless gusto. 

Laughter bubbles through the tears, through the confusion, through the grief, because this entire conversation was weird as fuck, and so very Cas it hurt to think about. 

“Cas,” Sam’s voice sounded very far away, parts incredulous and worshipful and exasperated, “get your feathered butt in gear and damn well hug my brother already man.” 

Cas looks like a ruffled hedgehog. And more determined and sure than he has since their first apocalypse. “I planned to, but thank you for the reminder of my priorities Sam.” Blue eyes flicked away for a moment, and Dean choked at the loss. “I will hug you as well, once I have attended to Dean. And then, we will head back to the bunker. I need to see Jack.” 

He sounds so damn sure of himself, and for a moment, Dean feels twenty-nine again, young and bewildered and angry and so damn in awe it took his breath away. He’s missed Cas. 

Dean’s choked breaths get the best of him finally, his legs beginning to fold under him, and then Cas is finally, finally just there, trench coat, blue eyes, hidden wings, angelic mojo, gravel for a voice, and granite for a skeleton and all. Cas has hugged Dean many times over the years, has held him up, held him down, held him back, held him close, held him together, in every imaginable scenario. 

And yet, as arms snake around his shoulders, a familiar hand guiding his face against the edges of a slightly crooked tie, another rubbing circles on his back, Dean does something he’s never done before. Never allowed himself to do before. 

He hugs back. 

And as they’re standing there, holding onto each other like a life raft in a hurricane, nothing back happens. Amazingly, impossibly, nothing bad happens. John Winchester doesn’t descend from heaven to scream at him, Sam doesn’t gasp in astonishment, God doesn’t pop up and take Cas away, Michael doesn’t beam in and smite them, Gabriel doesn’t snap his fingers and say tricked you kiddo. 

Cas doesn’t push him away. He doesn’t let go. 

Dean doesn’t know how long they remain like that, his fingers slowly losing feeling where they are fisted in that damn trench’s collar, Cas’ arms warm and real and safe. He is startled to realise he no longer cares. About any of it. About anything but the angel in his arms. 

And standing there, somehow, Dean can feel the pieces of himself start to fall back into place, start to hurry back from the corners he’s thrown them into, start to bind together. Start to heal. 

Dean shifts his head further into Cas’ neck, and breaths his words into his angel’s pulse point. 

“I’ve missed you Cas.” 

Lips brush his ear, hot and sure and here. 

“I know Dean.” 

Dean blinks, jerking back as much as the fingers wrapped around his skull will allow. 

“Did-did you just Han Solo me?” Incredulous doesn’t quite cover it. 

Cas’ lips don’t so much as twitch, the bastard. “I don’t understand that reference.” Liar.  
Dean seriously has to get around to teaching him poker sometime this decade. 

Sam comes up behind them, his face tear streaked, his eyes smiling. Dean has missed his little brother’s smile, so damn much. 

“You’re both ridiculous, you know that right?” 

Dean exchanges glances with Cas, who has loosened his grip enough to permit them to almost stand abreast. Almost. 

Green and blue eyes regard Sam with equal flatness. “That’s what big brothers are for Sammy.” 

One moose initiated group hug later, Sam takes the keys and declares he is driving. Dean sits in the back seat without so much as a protest, Cas pressed against his side, their hands laced together across his knee. 

Cas begins a quiet lecture on proper ways of coping with grief. Dean tunes him out and happily thinks about pie. 

In the review mirror, Sam is grinning like a loon the entire way home. 

00

The Bunker is…interesting. Jack freezes, blows out all the lights in the bunker, and bursts into tears. Cas’ wings are apparently back, because he flies the all of ten foot distance in his hast to get to Jack. He also refuses to let go of Dean, which is how he finds himself in yet another group hug situation. 

And apparently how he is now co-parent of a Nephilim. Wonderful. Cas’ hand flicks the back of Dean’s head with the gentlest brush of a reprimanding flick. Dean finds himself beaming helplessly for reasons he is way, way too tired to examine. 

And Cas is ten for ten on the mind reading tonight, because five awkward minutes later, all current occupants of the bunker are squished into Dean’s newly queen-sized bed, Jack pressed again his father’s far side, Sam curled around their feet like an over-sized puppy. 

But Cas holds Dean securely, the hunter’s ear pressed against the angel’s heart. 

And with each reassuring beat, Dean feels his despair, his grief, his anger, begin to melt like snow. 

And there, in his mojoed bed, surrounded by weird ass his family, held in the arms of his newly resurrected angel, Dean Winchester gazes steadily up at the ceiling, takes a cleansing breath, and finds the faith to whisper a quiet prayer to God. 

“Thanks…Dad.”

00

The next morning, Dean introduces Jack to the time honoured tradition of pie for breakfast. Cas just sighs and steals bites from Dean's fork. Sam smiles serenely. 

Dean has found his win. And this time, he means to keep it.


End file.
